Pages

Wednesday, 11 May 2011

A New Taliban in Libya? (Gateway)

M D Nalapat

Amidst the rejoicing over NATO’s fight for the ‘liberation’ of Libya
from Col. Muammar Gaddafi’s four-decade-long rule, few have bothered to
ask the dark question: who are these rebels, apparently without a face
or organization? How did they ‘win’ the support of NATO’s military
might, and find a way of closing in on Gaddafi and his supporters? How
did Al Qaeda and fundamentalist involvement quietly surface amidst the
mayhem? And what does this mean for the West and for the rest of the
Middle East?

The answer lies in the events of 1994, when the US
backed the Taliban to defeat the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. Had
the Clinton administration not backed them from 1994 to their takeover
of Kabul in 1996 and beyond, the Taliban would never have taken over
more than three-fourths of Afghanistan, Al Qaeda would never have become
a global organization, and the history of the world in this 21st
century would have been different.

The players in this grim game
are well known. It is no secret that the elements that later coalesced
into the Taliban, had their fairy godmother in the former US Assistant
Secretary of State for South Asia, Robin Raphel. She even demanded, as
far back as 1997, that Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance resistance
leader, Ahmad Shah Massoud (later assassinated by Al Qaeda operatives on
September 9, 2001) surrender to the ISI's favoured militia.

Thus
far there has been no negative blowback for her career. Instead,
another US president, George W. Bush, utilised her services in Iraq, and
Hillary Clinton ensured Raphel's return to Afghan affairs in 2009 as a
team member of the late Richard Holbrooke, US envoy to Afghanistan and
Pakistan. Throughout her tenure in the newly-created South Asia desk at
the State department in the early years, Raphel batted for the Pakistan
army, getting her reward in the form of a lobbying assignment for that
country in 1997 after she stepped down from her diplomatic post.

Raphel,
backed by the oil giant Unocal, touted the Taliban as a band of
"reliable" and "moderate" individuals who could be expected to side with
the West in the Afghan Great Game, unlike the Northern Alliance, which -
largely by default - was close to Russia, India and Iran. Laudatory
articles on the "corruption-fighting" militia began to appear in outlets
such as the International Herald Tribune from 1994 onwards, and soon
afterwards in other US and European publications.

Only by around
the end of 1999, when the medieval quality of their rule became too
obvious to conceal, did the hosannas stop. Soon after came 9/11, an
atrocity in which the Taliban played a significant role. Even then
(perhaps because Vice-President Cheney's favourite Afghan-American
Zalmay Khalilzad too had been a backer of the ultra-Wahabi militia),
there was no effort made to step back and internalize the policy error
which led to the US ensuring the ascent to power of the Taliban, a
process in which cash played by far the most significant role

Such
a re-evaluation of policy, had it been made, may perhaps have ensured
that the pell-mell rush of France, the UK and the US to neuter Colonel
Gaddafi and replace him with a band of insurgents from the east of
Libya, may have been avoided. Instead, several "wise men" of European
academe have rushed to Benghazi and certified the eastern insurgents as
exactly the sort of people deserving of backing from NATO, unlike the
theatrical Gaddafi.

Such misreading of the facts seems to have
led to yet another glandular - rather than cerebral - reaction from
French President Nicholas Sarkozy, rapidly followed by UK Prime Minister
David Cameron. The next in this procession of the gullible has been US
President Barack Obama, although to his credit, it appears to be clear
that the Libyan adventure is less his choice than one of his secretary
of state and spouse of the former US President who enabled the Taliban
to come to power in Afghanistan in 1996.

Hillary Clinton is much
more a European than she is an American, and it shows in the way she
allows herself to be led by the major powers of that Continent in her
foreign policy

Unfortunately for those in favour of sane policies
towards a volatile region, the lead is being taken by elements who have
urged the muscular response from NATO in Libya and who are clearly
ignorant of Arabic. These policy-makers, it seems, have yet to access
the numerous samizdat
tracts against Colonel Gaddafi that have been authored by the very
individuals that NATO is helping to come to power in Libya. These tracts
do indeed call for a jihad against Gaddafi, but not because he is a
dictator. Rather, he is excoriated for the crime of allowing women to
come out in public without the veil and even - what could be more
degenerate? - work in close proximity to men. He is chastised for not
following such examples of enlightenment as Saudi Arabia in imposing (
the Wahabbi version of) Sharia law in Libya. Reports from refugees
fleeing the region talk of the Wahabbi core of the insurgency brutally
exterminating secular Libyans, facts as yet unreported by the cheering
Western media.

Is this what NATO is working so hard to ensure, a
Libya where women are forced into the veil, and where Sharia law
prevails? Given the Wahabbi propensities of the Bannu Ismail and the
four other tribes hostile to Colonel Gaddafi, it is no surprise that
Qatar and Saudi Arabia want the "apostate" out. But what they regard as
crimes is hardly seen as such by the populations of the NATO powers.
Predictably, the media in North America and Europe has taken its cue
from Sarkozy, Cameron and Clinton, and are repeating the mantra of the
insurgents being "moderate" and even "democratic."

There is no
doubt that several Middle Eastern donors to the Clinton Foundation
regard the veiling of women as "moderate," and the imposition of a
Wahabbi version of Sharia law as "democratic."

They have clearly carried the day in the chancelleries of NATO

As
in 1994-96, when a band of fanatics were empowered by the West against
brutal but secular opponents, a similar mistake is taking place in
Libya. And as with 9/11, this too will have a blowback.

No comments:

Post a Comment

M D Nalapat's Latest Book

Click on image to buy

Search this blog

Share this blog

Follow by Email

About Prof. M. D. Nalapat

Prof. Madhav Das Nalapat (aka MD Nalapat or Monu Nalapat), holds the UNESCO Peace Chair and is Director of the Department of Geopolitics at Manipal Academy of Higher Education, India. The former Coordinating Editor of the Times of India, he writes extensively on security, policy and international affairs. Prof. Nalapat has no formal role in government, although he is said to influence policy at the highest levels. @MD_Nalapat

MD Nalapat's anthology 'Indutva' (1999)

In 1999, Har-Anand published Indutva an anthology of MD Nalapat's 1990s columns from the Times of India. The individual columns are posted here, in 1998 and 1999 of the blog archive, though the exact dates of publication are uncertain.